Hawkker - An aggregator for independent food brands

My Reflections on the Role

Why I founded Hawkker

Having previously worked in a startup I felt that my future would remain forevermore within early-stage businesses. After selling some shares at Kind Consumer I had initially wanted to start my own food business. I attended Le Cordon Bleu Culinary school with a view to opening a Lebanese bakery after graduation.

I researched the business case for opening a restaurant and was in a better position to understand the main issues facing food startups. Beyond the astronomical central London rents, staffing challenges and day-to-day demands of running a hospitality business, food startups had a high failure rates because they were struggling to make customers even aware of their existence. My research showed most customers are relatively risk-averse, they would rather go for something they know they will like rather than take the risk discovering something they might love.

To de-risk choices, customers need more information. However these small, time-limited, inexperienced food businesses were poor at sharing information in a readily-available and accessible way to customers. This gave me the idea for Hawkker - provide a great service for people wanting to discover all the available small food businesses near them and support food startups in reaching a bigger audience.

The fun side of starting a business

My favourite things about starting my own business was the diversity of roles and tasks that I would have to do on a given day and the amount of new skills that I learnt.

Any given day would be diverse: In the morning I might be reviewing a new feature and discussing changes with the engineering team, then around lunchtime I would be pitching to vendors at a street food market and in the evening posting some content on social media and reviewing applicants for a role.

Prior to starting Hawkker, I had minimal experience in technology or digital marketing. Every day on the job I would be learning new things, from the engineering behind the product, to designing interfaces with tools like Figma to understanding how to use platforms like Facebook or Google ad management tools. For somebody who developing new skills likes to have visibility across all functions within a business, startup life is great.

The challenges of starting a business

Starting a business and being an entrepreneur is exciting, however it is more often than not exhausting and infuriating. Beyond the usual issues of having limited funding and limited time there are lots of challenges (most of them mental). Firstly you have to be very comfortable with not doing things perfectly. There are many times when you will have to do something well enough and quickly move on to the next thing.

The second challenge is the frequently need to context switch and have you focus pulled in many directions at once. You will have to wear many hats and be prepared to jump between them often. When you are running a diverse and agile team, there are lots of small decisions that need to be made quickly. More often than not your team is relative new to the business so they will often come to you for input (rather than their own judgement) on whatever it is they are working on.

The final, but by far the most important point is about making mistakes. You will have to get very used to doing things incorrectly, going down blind alleys and wasting money and time on things that turn out to be completely misguided. This is inevitable and is the "cost of doing business" for any startup. If you try and run your business with a "right first time" approach and do not build in some contingency of either time or money (usually both) you are going to have some very stressful days.

Keeping your sanity

When you start a business it does feel like your baby and nobody wants to hear that they have an ugly baby. You need to get over this and listen to everybody around you. Your customers, employees, people you pitch to, your friend etc.etc. You don't have to necessarily accept everything that they say, but you need to honestly appraise whether they might be right or not and what that might mean for you and your business.

Furthermore when you fail in your venture (either on the way to success or not), avoid beating yourself up. It is hard not to since as a founder your business is your life and your obsession, but remember it isn't a reflection of you as a person. It's only a reflection on the current state of a project you happen to be working on right now.

Key learnings

I enjoyed starting and scaling a technology business and am continuing my career within early stage tech companies. One of my key learnings from Hawkker was that I started it without a robust enough understanding of the engineering. This lack of fundamentals led me to make some decisions on the product which were needlessly expensive and time consuming. Following Hawkker I completed a full-stack engineering bootcamp and taken courses on AI, devOps and design to close off some of these blind spots for the future. If I had had these skills when I founded Hawkker I could have built the platform myself at a fraction of the cost I spent on agencies and engineers. My advice to anybody wanting to start a technology business would be to have a decent understanding of the engineering or have a CTO who does.